UK facilities crisis: cock-up or conspiracy?

18:08 11 January 2010

Brian Cox, a particle physicist at the University of Manchester, UK, has been one of the most vocal critics of the sharp cuts recently announced by the British Science and Technology Facilities Council - defended in this blog last week by John Womersley, the STFC's director of science programmes. Now Cox has sent us a lengthy response, which we've divided into two parts.

In today's instalment, Cox explains why he doesn't accept that the current crisis at the STFC is the result of general economic malaise, and asks if there's a deeper agenda behind the cuts. Tomorrow, he'll explains why he believes the consequences will be far-reaching - wrecking careers and damaging the UK's national interest

John Womersley began his defence of the STFC's winter of cuts in the S Word by citing the effect of the global financial crisis and using phrases such as "prudent management, clear priority-setting, a sustainable and affordable programme and realistic planning". Inexplicably, he also described the cuts as "Fair and Balanced", stealing the slogan from Fox News.

In response, I want to argue that the STFC crisis, whether cock-up or conspiracy, is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise. Let's start with the facts behind the STFC funding woes.
The cause of the crisis

In the comprehensive spending review of 2007, well before the onset of the financial crisis, STFC received the lowest increase in "near cash" (which is Whitehall speak for actual money that can be spent) of all research councils except Arts and Humanities. Furthermore, and quite bafflingly, STFC was the only research council whose near cash allocation actually fell from financial year 2008/09 to 2009/10. As the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Select Committee put it in their report published in April 2008, STFC received a "flat near-cash allocation that will erode against inflation".

Do not let the oft-quoted ministerial line that STFC received a 13.6 per cent increase in funding confuse you. This "Yes Minister" figure includes something called non-cash, which is an accounting device to cover paper costs such as depreciation on facilities, of which STFC has many. You can't spend non-cash because it doesn't exist and should therefore be kept out of any discussion of STFC's financial woes.

STFC's current financial difficulties stem from this initial flat-cash settlement and not from any cuts imposed by government as a result of the financial crisis. It is indeed true, as John Womersley points out, that the decreasing value of the pound could have impacted STFC in a very negative way, but the government compensated STFC for these fluctuations and they are therefore not the reason for the current round of cuts. Indeed, Paul Drayson recently announced a review of the provision of major non-sterling subscriptions such as ESA, ESO and CERN from STFC's budget. This is greatly to be welcomed and hopefully will result in a more sensible system, similar to those of other major European countries, in which currency fluctuations are absorbed at a much higher level than research councils.

These are the facts. The cuts are not in any significant way a result of prudent management, nothing to do with the financial crisis and very definitely not the result of some realignment of priorities originating from within the scientific community. They are the result of a poor cash settlement for STCF in 2007. We must now move into the realm of speculation to understand the reason for this unfavourable and damaging cash settlement.

Why was the STFC underfunded?

Taking a generous view, it is possible that the cash allocation to STFC was simply a mistake. This is possible because the merger between STFC's predecessors - the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, PPARC and the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, CCLRC - was rushed through by a new government department (the recently defunct Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, DIUS), and overseen by no less than two jobbing science ministers, Malcolm Wicks and Ian Pearson, who, it might diplomatically be noted, were not science aficionados. If this is the case then the mistake shouldn't have been difficult to spot.

In fact, the STFC budget allocated in 2007 was very nearly the sum of the old PPARC and CCLRC budgets, with a small increase to account for the government's Full Economic Costing policy (FEC). It must have been known within DIUS that this allocation would result in significant damage to the STFC science programme because, as Keith O'Nions, then director general of the research councils, put it in his evidence to the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Select Committee, CCLRC was "carrying difficulties".

These difficulties were associated with the increased running costs of the expanded ISIS neutron source and new Diamond Synchrotron, which replaced the much smaller synchrotron radiation source at Daresbury Laboratory: CCLRC did not have sufficient money in its budget to run these greatly expanded facilities, although there were no legacy costs associated with their construction. This is not a matter of opinion, but a statement from The National Audit Office which highlighted a £25 million-a-year deficit in CCLRC's budget associated with these costs at 2006/07 prices. That's around £80 million over the CSR period, which goes a long way to explaining the need for STFC's reprioritisation programme. Again in the words of the select committee, "the former PPARC community is being penalised by the merger with CCLRC. This is a situation that the government had promised would not come about."

Obvious as it should have been, the problem may therefore simply have been that STFC was a rushed job. Quoting from the select committee report once more, "The timing of the formation of STFC was not propitious. It takes time to set up a new organisation, especially one as large and complex as STFC. The government's expectation that STFC would be ready for a new CSR was overly ambitious."

If this explanation is correct, it raises very serious questions about the role of STFC's senior management and their ability to communicate with top civil servants such as Keith O'Nions, whose job it is to avoid such gargantuan and damaging cock-ups in UK science policy. Surely a quiet word behind the scenes from Keith Mason, CEO of STFC, would have been sufficient to alert O'Nions of the coming cataclysm. Perhaps the truth will never be established in the public domain.

We must also face the possibility, however, that the cock-up theory is incorrect and that there may have been a deliberate cause for STFC's underfunding in 2007. What if there were those in the government or perhaps within the civil service who reached the view that PPARC was rather too successful at procuring money from government and in funding a flourishing and vibrant UK space science, astronomy and particle physics programme? Perhaps it was considered politically unpalatable to cut these blue-skies, high-profile and publically popular programmes directly, at a time when the economy was booming and the government wished to be seen as a champion of science. A separate problem was the misfiring CCLRC, custodian of new world-leading facilities like The Diamond Light Source which government was delighted to fund as headline-grabbing capital projects but rather less happy to take on the unglamorous task of actually paying to run. Sir Humphrey may have noticed an opportunity; cut the blue skies boys and save CCLRC without injecting new cash. Idle conspiracy theory this may be, but it is undoubtedly what has actually happened, whether intended or not.

Tomorrow I will explain how if this underfunding is left unchallenged there could be serious consequences for the future of science in the UK, and therefore our national prosperity.

It is also worth noting that Keith Mason is on record as stating that there are too many astronomers in the UK (his views on particle and nuclear physicists are not so clear). This statement could well be based on a miscalculation - several times in 2008 he claimed that the number of astronomy academics has swollen by 40% since 2005. This was surely a frightening growth to DIUS and could have prompted a move to try to slim down the budget to stem this tide of blue skies thinkers. However using PPARC's and STFC's figures the actual growth in academics in that period appears to be closer to 4% (see Paul Crowther's excellent webpage for more details). An order of magnitude difference does not instill confidence.

Then we had reports of much celebration at STFC following CSR2007 - allegedly it was thought to be a good settlement at first, until someone checked the numbers. Could someone have just asked for too little money?

So conspiracy meets cock-up?

Raving
on January 11, 2010 6:55 PM

Sorry. but I feel dense today
What is the S Word ?

Yesterday was Sunday.

Karl
on January 11, 2010 10:51 PM

Whether or not the cuts are "fair and balanced" is irrelevant. Cutting research is short sighted and stupid no matter how equitably those cuts are distributed. Besides, the money saved will amount to no more than a rounding error on what the government squanders daily.

Probably the best way to reason with brainless politicians and bureaucrats is the way Faraday did regarding electricity when he said "I do not know what it is good for but of one thing I am quite certain. Someday you will tax it."

By blueboy
on January 11, 2010 11:05 PM

it's all about the blue skies;unrestrained thinking and creativity, unless you don't care about science, in which case it's all about the money you can get at the end of any research. FACT

Dave N
on January 12, 2010 4:49 AM

The ego of some scientists - especially physicists - passes belief. Whatever you may think, you do not have a God-given right to pursue your hobbies at the tax-payers expense. It is far from easy to make the case that, on balance, physicists contribute to the sum of human happiness.

Christian Cosgriff
on January 12, 2010 8:49 AM

Kudos to Brian Cox for his efforts in opposing the cuts.

Andy
on January 12, 2010 1:08 PM

The S Word is the name of this section :)

By Douglas MacGregor
on January 12, 2010 1:23 PM

The recent and catastrophic history of STFC is well known to all scientists working in this area, and there is nothing in Brian's account I would take issue with. However, I am very grateful to him for drawing these facts to the attention of a much wider audience.

While the historic problems of STFC are bad news for particle physics and astronomy, they have been an absolute disaster for nuclear physics which was transferred from EPSRC to STFC at its start-up.

I look forward to reading Brian's prognosis for the future. It promises to be a very sobering wake up call for all concerned.

Anonymous
on January 12, 2010 5:45 PM

A pretty good analysis of the problems. But it doesn't fully expose just what a dirty trick the non-cash scam is. Non-cash is indeed payment for depreciation of new facilities. These are created by grants from the Large Capital Facilities Fund, and trumpeted as "new money for science". Such payments continue to happen (e.g. 236 Million to STFC in July 2008). But they're really just a loan, to be paid back via a non-cash line in your spreadsheet. But guess what? This non-cash allocation is also "new money for science": STFC's total budget did go up 13.6%. You count the money going in and coming out. These guys at the treasury are smart. So STFC got 236 Million deeper in debt after the 2007 crisis, which means the non-cash "allocation" will be even larger next CSR, eating further into the money you can really spend. Given the likelihood of real spending cuts in addition, the flat cash disaster of 2007 is likely to resemble paradise in years to come. The only way out of this is for the Treasury to change its daft accounting rules.

As to whether all this was a conspiracy to dig CCLRC out of its self-inflicted hole, the answer will come from what happens next. Having gorged on PPARC, the beast on Oxfordshire needs another grant-awarding innocent to feed its habit. So will STFC merge with EPSRC?

warning
on January 12, 2010 7:30 PM

Mr. Cox and CERN have no credibility. The cuts seem far less than it would be desired given the risks of potential genocide of CERN's facilities and its null interest for science. We should start to differentiate the good and bad fruits of technology. The study of the big-bang will be done directly by the webb telescope in 2 years without risks of provoking a catastrophe on earth. And the higgs is as per Nambu's last year nobel prize, a top quark, rewritten with new equations and pumped up by leo lederman as god's particle to market to reagan a 13 billion $ 'quark cannon'. We have a solid theory of mass as the frequency of information of Einstein's accelerated whirls of space-time (Principle of equivalence between mass and acceleration) put forward by among others Mr. Wilczek,nobel prize, discoverer of the strong force, which also warned of the creation of strangelets, latter confirmed by the shangai institute of nuclear physics, http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0512112 and aknowledge by Mr. Cox in a bbc program before he worked for cern.
The company tells us that the quark cannon will produce the quark-gluon soup responsible for the biggest explosion in the Universe, the big-bang, when a quark -gluon soup exploded with such amazing power that it blew up the space-time of the Cosmos to the size it is now. We discovered in the last decade, when the machine was already commisioned and could not be stopped without shutting down CERN, that a quark condensate is the cause of Nova and Supernova explosions that create pulsars, before thought to be made of neutrons, now known to have a quark-gluon soup in its center. Thus, if a quark-gluon soup exploded with such force as to dillate space-time to the limits of the Universe and a tiny quantity of it starts a Nova reaction, it is obvious that the same quark soup could blow up of the Earth.
The corruption of this company has been recently exposed by MIT's technological magazine http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24611/ CERN should be shut down and resources used in science that truly accomplishes the 2 goals of sound research: real knowledge and improving the life of humanity not endanger it.